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hole and
murmuring their surprise. One man moved aside and I stepped into his
place.
    Perfectly smooth
ivory-colored bones framed the empty orbital sockets that met my
horrified stare. I was face-to-face with a human skull, buried behind
the ancient wall.

    4
    Mike Chapman stood in
front of the skeletal head that had been exposed in the basement of the
Third Street building. "The Thin Man, eh, Coop? What homicide dick
wouldn't give his left leg to come face-to-face with the Thin Man?"
    The professor assigned
by the law school dean to wait out the arrival of the police didn't
seem to appreciate Mike's humor and had no reason to know that every
unidentified corpse he encountered was given a nickname, some way for
him to personalize the task at hand.
    "Whaddaya expect me to
do here?" Mike said, turning to Nan and me. "It's not even my
jurisdiction."
    "You think I'd call
those guys at Manhattan South after the way they treated me on that
last case?" I said.
    "I'm not talking
geography." Mike was the very best detective assigned to Manhattan
North Homicide, the elite squad responsible for all unnatural deaths
from the farthest tip of the island down to Fifty-ninth Street, and we
had worked scores of investigations together. "I'm talking centuries. I
got people tripping over me and my partner to get to the morgue-they're
shooting and stabbing each other, sticking up bodegas for nickels and
dimes, throwing babies out windows like there were trampolines on the
sidewalk, filling hypodermics with poison and poppin' 'em in their
veins. Current events are overwhelming me and you broads call me down
here 'cause some old colonial codger got buried in the basement two
hundred years ago?"
    The construction
workers had started to pull the bricks away to about chest level. The
figure seemed frozen in place, raised arms bent and fingers
outstretched, as though they had been pressing against the wall that
had entombed them.
    But the workmen
stopped at that point-at our urging-as the bones began to shift and
several ribs dropped away to the floor of the dark hole in which the
fully articulated skeleton stood.
    "I called Hal Sherman
at the Crime Scene Unit while Alex was looking for you," Nan said to
Mike. Every prosecutor had a favorite detective and we each hoped to
get one of them to respond as quickly as possible this time. "I think I
can still hear him laughing."
    "You picked the right
night, bright eyes. CSU's got a pile of body parts sticking out of a
snow mound that was plowed off a street in TriBeCa last weekend and a
domestic with five down, the perp still out looking for his wife's
goombah. You bet Sherman's laughing at you. This antique bag of bones
is not going to be a priority for him or anybody else in the department
until the spring thaw. It'll probably take the docs that long to figure
out what they've got and how long it's been here."
    Professor Walter Davis
stepped away from the skeleton. "What do you propose to do about this,
Mr. Chapman?"
    "I've got a call into
the medical examiner's office. They'll send a death investigator over
to figure out how to dismantle this character properly and give him a
place to lay down for a while. Long time to be on your feet."
    "Who's coming?" I
asked.
    Mike shrugged. "I
asked for Dorfman. Andy Dorfman."
    The office had only
one forensic anthropologist. The overwhelming number of old bones that
people came across in an urban setting belonged to animals that had
once roamed the place more freely, and sometimes to humans who had died
of natural causes. Every now and then, the remains could be linked to a
homicidal death.
    "That's why you
stopped the digging?"
    "You got it. Andy
doesn't like anybody touching his bones until he's eyeballed the setup
for himself. I'm just waiting to see if he's available so I can help
him get started."
    Dorfman was a
perfectionist, a brilliant detail man who at thirty-eight had been a
leader in this specialty long before recent television shows and
popular media made